The Athens malikhane fell vacant in 1772 and was acquired by the infamous Hadji Ali Haseki, an Anatolian Turk who had been the personal bodyguard of Sultan Abdiil Hamit I. After being Malikhane Sahib for three years Hadji Ali was made voivode of Athens, a post to which he was reappointed four times in the following seventeen years. These were the worst years in the history of Athens under Ottoman tule; hundreds of Greeks, women along with men, were imprisoned on Hadji AS") orders, many of them dying in prison, and the city was impoverished by his extortionate taxes. Attica was twice overrun by hordes of Muslim Albanians during the first three years of his rule, the second time in 1778. This led Hadji Ali to construct a new defence wall around Athens, the so-called Serpentzes, which had a perimeter of about 10 km, indicating that the city had expanded well beyond the quarter now known as Plaka. Hadji Ali enlisted the entire population of Athens in the project, Turks and Greeks alike, and by working them day and night he completed the fortifications in less than four months. Then, as the chronicler Dimitrios Kalephronas writes: As soon as the work was completed, Hadji Ali presented the Athenians with a bill of 42,500 piastres for supervisors from outside, and they paid it. But, alas, that wall became a prison for the Athenians, though useful to the tyrant. He set guards at the gates, and his tyranny was worse than before. The Athenians suffered much, until in 1784 the curse of his rule was no longer to be bome. The longer he stayed in Athens the more his tyranny took root and grew worse. [Quoted Micheli, Monastirak.] Hadji Ali's excesses led the Porte (the Sublime Porte, named after (il WhatsApp Image....jpeg S| WhatsApp Image...ipeg * S| Whaa“ STROLLING THROUGH ATHENS the monumental entry-way to the headquarters of the Grand Vizir, was the Foreign Office of the Ottoman government) to bring him back to Istanbul in 1785 for trial, along with the Athenian archons who had supported him. But five years later he was reappointed voivode and returned to Athens, where an outbreak of the plague had killed off one a 1792: --» like a dragon creeping out of the den where he was hiding, he retook possession of the malikhane . .. In 1791 and this year too there was nothing but oppression, with people fleeing the country and the Athenians fleeing in every direction. The years 1789-92 were the worst in the twenty-year period of Hadji Ali's rule, if not in all the history of Athens. {Quoted Micheli, Monas- tiraki} The enormity of Hadji Ali's crimes had by then become evident even to the sultan, the liberal-minded Selim IIl, who banished him to Chios and had him beheaded there three years later. Hadji Ali’s head was then sent to Istanbul and displayed before the main gateway of Topkapi palace, as was customary for those executed by the sultan, as proof that the villain was really dead. During the latter Ottoman period Athens was visited by a number of travellers from northem Europe, some of whom wrote scholarly descriptions of the city or made drawings of its ancient monuments. Fortunately, two groups made careful studies of the Parthenon shortly before it was blown up in Morosini's bombardment, observing the temple while it was still virtually intact, except for the structural changes and damage that had taken place in its successive conversions, first to a church and then to a mosque. The first of these groups was Image...jpeq fill \atate anlage eamiing‘was on rear wall of the stage had eight aisles for statues, four of them arches and four quadrangular. A colonnade standing some 2 m forward of the stage wall supported a second storey, which in the interior may have opened out as a balcony. This storey and the one above had between them arched windows in three rows; these and the south facade most distinctive landmarks on the south slope of the Acropolis. Three doorways led from the stage on to a long, narrow vestibule, paved in a mosaic of variegated marble. On either side of the vestibule arched doorways led through vaulted chambers that gave access to the paradoi and thence to the lower tier of seats. Spectators going to the upper tier could enter from the second floor of the Stoa of Eumenes, where a stairway over the main entrance to the east led up to the top diazoma of the theatre. Several ancient writers make reference to the {ngt that the theatre had a roof of cedar wood. But surely this roof would have covered only the stage, for without intemal Supports it would have been quite impossible to have roofed the whole vast expanse of the auditorium. The Odeion of Herodes Atticus was undoubtedly destroyed in the Herulian sack of ap 267, and there is no evidence that it was ever rebuilt in ancient times. During the Turkish period the stage-building formed part of the Serpentzes, the fortification wall built in 1778 by Hadji Ali Haseki. The Serpentzes was dismantled after the Greek War of Independence, and the Odeion was excavated and cleared of later accretions in the decade 1848-58. The theatre was completely restored